Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Civil War vs Civil Rights

Caroline Klibanoff of Northeastern University has created an interactive map which shows where the southern states have memorialized the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement in street names. She has analyzed 6.8 million street names to find those streets named for Confederate and Civil Rights Movement leaders.

In Public Memory and Street Names in the South Caroline shows these Confederate and Civil Rights Movement named streets on one interactive map. The result is an incredibly well balanced map, with 1,132 streets named for Confederate leaders and 1,118 named for Civil Rights leaders.

Caroline's investigation into street names includes an interactive map which shows streets named 'Dixie' throughout the United States. This map reveals that the South has 1,000 Dixie named streets, while the North has just 72.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has found over 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces, mostly in the southern United States. These include not just roads named for Confederate leaders and battles but statues, memorials and schools as well. In Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy the SPLC has included an interactive map showing the location of these Confederate symbols and memorials. The map uses color coded markers to show which are monuments, which are schools and which are roads.